Sentey Halcon GS-6050 II Case Review

Installation
Now it is time to get everything inside the case. Let’s start with the motherboard, no some reason there is only a single motherboard standoff installed so you will have to install the rest manually. Also there is not standoff tool included so you will be installing them by hand. When it came time to get my motherboard in I noticed that the holes really did not line up exactly. I have to force the motherboard into place with one hand and try and screw the screws in with another. It has been quite some time since I’ve encountered a case where that has happened.

When it comes to installing 3.5-inch hard drives all of the trays have a simple tool-less system that works pretty well. 2.5-inch drives require you to screw them onto the trays. If you are installing 2.5-inch drives the power and data connections sit flush with the trays. This means if your SATA or power cables are larger or are at a 90 degree angle you will not be able to connect them to your drives.

To install your optical drive you will need to take off the front of the case. You will need to pull pretty hard to get it off. Just pull from the bottom of the case and it will pop off. Decide what bay you want to put your drive in, slide it in and put the front part of the case back on. If we look from the side of the case we can see that you can either use the tool-less system or screws. The tool-less system works pretty well though.

Now all we have to do is install our power supply, video card and wire everything up. After doing all of that you can see what I can only call a wiring disaster. Even with wiring things behind the case there is no way to keep things clean. This is caused by a few things. First you cannot install your hard drives with the connections facing the back of the case. Second the USB 3.0 cable need to be routed all the way around the case and just look horrendous going across the case. Third if you try and route the internal USB or HD audio cables behind the motherboard they will not reach the headers. Fourth there is no cutout for your CPU power cable, so you have to route it across the motherboard. Fifth all of the fans use molex connections so you can’t easily connect them to your motherboard or even a fan controller at a central location.

A big sixth is that you really cannot route anything behind the motherboard. As you can see from the photos below I routed just a few cables behind the motherboard. The zip ties I used were mine because the ones that came with the case broke, all 3 of them. Even with everything tied up I was still not able to get the side panel on. So if you really wanted to get the panel on you are going to have to route 95% of your cables through the main part of the case and that cannot make for good airflow at all. Also if you look at the photo below you can see the CPU cutout is quite small and you may have issues with some back-plates and mounting systems on CPU coolers.

When you do turn the system on all of the fans will light up bright blue, which does look pretty cool.